College football is a sport covered from head to toe. Games are televised practically every night of the week. There are a billion blogs and multiple team specific web-sites. Then you have the full buffet of games on each and every Saturday, where you can park yourself on your couch and watch them all. If you happen to miss something there are countless highlight shows.
Meanwhile, your lap top, tablet and or cell phone are [all] up and running. While you are watching the game of your choice you can be multi-tasking on twitter and on your favorite team’s message board on Scout.com.
Times have drastically changed. For me, twenty years ago, it seemed like watching west coast football or Michigan/Ohio State, seemed so far away, so distant from where I resided in Atlanta, Ga. or St. Petersburg, Fla.
But I don’t feel that now, not at all. Because of the cell phone, text messaging/email, social media, the 24 hours sports new cycle, ESPN, and the wall to wall coverage of college football in general, nothing feels far away with this game. We are all together in a sense watching the game we love unfold before our very eyes. We are sharing the experience together as fans from coast to coast.
The boom of technology combined with the television coverage has absolutely exploded the game of college football. It’s been a perfect storm and a perfect marriage.
And I get a real sense that this is how recruits see things today. Technology has given us this, opening up the recruiting doors more than ever for teams to recruit more on a “national basis”.
And that has opened up the door to the state of Florida for teams like Clemson, Syracuse, Cincinnati, UCLA and Boise State. Everyone comes to the Sunshine State to try and get their haul of the Florida football talent. In addition, there are just too many D1 kids in the Sunshine State and they all can’t stay home. Roughly 350 D1 kids from Florida sign every year.
Think about that for a minute. There are seven programs in the state – Florida, FSU, Miami, USF, UCF, FIU and FAU. Say they each sign 20 recruits (likely on the high side) each and every year. That’s only 140 prospects, leaving more than 200 kids to leave the state.
I am not just talking about Florida. Recruiting doors have been opened up to practically everyone across the country, whether you are Oregon andStanford out west or Rutgers and Penn State to the East. Certainly teams will recruit their state and region hard but technology and the coverage of the college game has essentially marketed and promoted so many of the other great programs and institutions throughout the country. This has made national recruiting easier for all, although recruiting is never easy.
